Wednesday 25 March 2009

No Point and Jenn Ashworth

I'm doing an MA in Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University. Even though I've lived in Manchester virtually my whole life it wasn't until starting the course that I was able to really tap into all the reading events and the huge network of writers there is here. Me and two other people from the course set up a magazine called Bewilderbliss to collect together some of the best writing from the University of Manchester and MMU down the road. It's going really well - there are some great pieces in it and some of those were read aloud and filmed on the launch night. The Bewilderbliss website features one of those readings at a time and changes every week or two, you can see what's there now by clicking here.
In addition to the official launch night we also had a segment in the incedibly popular No Point in Not Being Friends last night thanks to Chris Killen , who is a writing fellow at the Centre for New Writing.

This month, in a very special episode of No Point in Not Being Friends, the very lovely Jenn Ashworth launched her novel A Kind of Intimacy, which I snapped up a copy of. The reading she did was very funny, and if it's anything to go by, the book (which comes in at a weighty 282 pages) will flick past in a flurry of pages that will have me wishing it was twice the length.

2 comments:

  1. is Jenn Ashworth a local girl then? Are you going to give a small and humble review of the book on here? Or would that be off topic at all? I saw the cover - fairly awful. What's awful about it is there seems to be a weird trend of (presumably) young and mostly unknown authors getting lumped with horrendous photographs as their covers and they're mostly of girls legs or girls backs and never, ever, girls faces. Which probably says alot, I don't know. Seems like bad luck to me that all these authors are so shat on. I don't mean to hijack this post or make anything more of this point - just an observation.

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  2. She is local, she's local and very sweet and lovely. I'm with you on not liking those generic girl's legs covers, but in this case the cover actually conveys a lot of what the books about - an obese woman looking for love. I will review it as soon as I get a chance to read it.

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